Certain entities, such as financial institutions, are required to follow various rules and regulations. Further, an entity may be required to ensure that employees of the entity are complying with rules and regulations regarding insider trading, trading in restricted securities, timing of trades, and the size of trades. For example, the SEC and NASD set forth various regulations for employees of financial institutions or related organizations. Additionally, employers may voluntarily impose additional rules or restrictions on employees. In the case of a financial institution (e.g., a bank, saving and loan institution, credit union, mortgage company, lending company, or stock broker), employees may be restricted from investing in the stock of a customer, restricted to trading a customer's stock in certain situations, or restricted in the amount that can be invested in a customer's stock. In the case of an investment advisor, the advisor may be restricted from trading securities ahead of client trades (e.g., front running).
Existing systems for monitoring compliance with these types of rules and regulations require a considerable amount of manual work, such as manually reviewing account statements provided to employees by third party financial institutions (e.g., the employee's stock broker). An employee may arrange for a third party financial institution to provide duplicate account statements to an employer, but the employer is still required to review the account statement for compliance with various rules and regulations. Such a process is tedious and time-consuming, especially in the case of an employer with a large number of employees to monitor. Furthermore, since account statements are typically issued monthly or quarterly, the information in the account statement may be out-of-date by the time the employer reviews the account statement.
The systems and methods described herein allow an individual or entity to delegate authority to another individual or entity to access account information from another organization. In specific embodiments, an employee delegates authority to an employer to access account information from a third party financial institution to monitor compliance with various rules and/or regulations.